LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Crissy Rock, Vladimir Vega. Screenplay: Rona Munro. Director: Ken Loach.
Arriving as it does in the middle of the Newt Gingrich-generated national discussion on the benefits of removing children from unstable homes, LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD could not be more timely. Although set in England rather than the U.S., it presents a fact-based, textbook case for the esteemed speaker's social services plan. And while director Ken Loach could not possibly have realized it, he has made a film which should inspire both sides in this debate to consider their points of view more carefully. Harrowing, challenging yet never pedantic, LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD is about as balanced a presentation of a difficult issue as one could hope for, a portrait of a self-destructive woman colliding with a by-the-book system, and brought to breathtaking life by a knockout debut performance from Crissy Rock.
Rock plays Maggie Conlon, a working-class lounge singer who seems never to have had a break in her life. The child of an abusive father, she has gone on to a series of relationships which has produced four children, all by different fathers. Early in the film, she meets Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a Paraguayan political activist and a refugee from his home country, and describes in flashback how she came to lose custody of her children to social services. Maggie and Jorge grow closer, and soon decide to begin a family of their own. However, Maggie finds it impossible to escape from her past, and as the government continues to follow her every move she finds her own abrasive personality making matters worse at every turn.
Director Loach, the poet laureate of the contemporary English working class (RIFF RAFF, RAINING STONES) has delivered perhaps his most powerful film yet with LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD. He tells Maggie's story in a straight-ahead fashion, eschewing cinematic hyperbole or heavy musical cues. It is a dramatic enough story in its own right, and Loach knows it. A pair of scenes in the film show two children, one the young Maggie and the other one of Maggie's own children, responding to witnessing an abusive father, and there is little else Loach needs to do to demonstrate the self-perpetuating cycle domestic violence creates. He also trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions from Maggie's story, and presents both Maggie and the government social workers alternately as the solution and the problem. This is a story in which, ultimately, there are no winners, and Loach refuses to let us off the hook by giving us a convenient villain.
What really makes the ambiguity work is the incendiary performance by Crissy Rock, who had never acted before LADYBIRD. Hard-edged and painfully low on self-esteem, Maggie repeatedly torpedoes her own chances for happiness by refusing to believe that she deserves any, and Rock plays this out in several incredibly emotional scenes, every one of which feels completely honest. She layers Maggie's character so expertly that at times it truly does appear that she is an unfit mother, making it hard to fault the government's intentions. It's powerful work by a performer who understands instinctively that a character like this has to be real, and Rock truly becomes Maggie. In fact, she's so powerful that she completely eclipses Vladimir Vega's Jorge, whose character is never developed quite as fully as Maggie's. There's a reason that he sticks by her through so much hardship, but I, like Maggie, wasn't always sure what that reason was.
The screenplay by Rona Munro, though based on a true story, is dramatically unwieldy towards the end; scenes begin to repeat themselves, and I started to feel that I was being put through an emotional wringer. It's one of those cases where a bit of license with fact might have made for a tighter and even more effective story. But it amounts to quibbling to fault LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD for being too true to a gripping story. It's a film that makes demands of its audience, specifically to look at this story and to reach its own conclusions about whether or not Maggie was treated fairly. Her story is so riveting, and so spectacularly re-created by Crissy Rock, that any audience should be up to that challenge.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 foster children: 8.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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